The Biodiversity Support Program (BSP) be-
gan the study in late 1992 with funding from
the U.S. Agency for International Devel-
opment's (USAID) Africa Bureau (AFR), Of-
fice of Sustainable Development, Division of
Productive Sector Growth and the Environ-
ment. The project was originally titled Analy-
sis of Attitudes and Activity Change in Inte-
grated Conservation and Development. The
analysis grew from USAID's concern about the
effectiveness of environmental education and
communication activities in Africa. The as-
sumption underlying many of those activities
was that knowledge would change people's at-
titudes about the environment, which would,
in turn, change their behavior. The USAID Af-
rica Bureau asked BSP to examine this assump-
tion and provide advice about approaches and
methods for improving the effectiveness of en-
vironmental education and communication ac-
tivities.

The study began with an extensive review of
the literature and interviews with experts to
learn more about behavior, attitude formation
and change, and environmental education. We
quickly realized that many factors influence
behavior-not just knowledge and attitudes, the
factors typically targeted by environmental edu-
cation. We set out to examine approaches for
understanding the many factors that influence
behavior toward the environment. Our goal was
to help practitioners-the field-level designers,
implementers, and managers of activities,
projects, and programs-better understand the
motivations of environmental behaviors and
thereby influence those behaviors more effec-
tively to foster sustalnable natural resources
management.

An initial period of field work, involving site
visits and interviews with practitioners in
Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, Tanza-
nia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe was carried out be-
tween June 1993 and August 1994. The field
work supplemented our literature- and inter-
view-based research with information about the
methods of social assessment and research be-
ing used in the field, the problems and successes
associated with those methods, and the needs
that practitioners themselves identified.

We responded to those expressed needs from
the field with further study. We synthesized
what we had learned in a discussion paper,
which was sent out for review in January 1995
to approximately 80 practitioners and resource
persons in Africa and the United States.

The reviews of the discussion paper revealed
some strong differences of opinion about a num-
ber of key issues facing practitioners in con-
servation and development today-issues of
values, of participation and power, of the rela-
tive importance of local versus larger-scale de-
terminants of behavior, and of the role of so-
cial sciences and social scientists in natural re-
sources management. We explored those key
issues in a workshop held in April 1995 in
Washington, D.C., and in a series of interviews
and meetings with key reviewers. This report
reflects all we learned in the review of the dis-
cussion paper and the follow-up workshop and
interviews.

We hope that the findings and conclusions of
the analytical "safari" reflected in this report
will be useful to practitioners seeking to un-
derstand what motivates environmental behav-
iors, and to influence them through effective
actions at the local, national, and international
levels in order to promote sustainable natural
resources management. We also hope that this